The mess took a while to clean up. My backpack had fallen apart in a weird way, both the zipper and two of the seams had fallen apart, so it was now useless as a bag. My stomach hurt, and my nose was bleeding again.

Mr Pheizer took Billy away, then returned with Clyde, the school custodian. Clyde had gray hair and a slight stoop. He looked ancient to me, but moved with a quick grace. As I wondered how he could move so well, I caught sight of my reflection in a chrome stall handle.

“It’s called economy of movement,” Not-me said, “And no, I can’t read your mind, thank god, it’s obvious what you’re thinking from your face. You’ll want to work on that before trying your hand at poker.”

Not-me had calmed down, and sounded almost civil. I began to stack my books by the wall, losing sight of my reflection. One of the history books had a stylized oversized letter on the cover, filled with a reflective silver. A bloodshot eye peeked out of it.

I opened my mouth to ask a question, then glanced at Clyde, thinking better of it, and kept quiet.

“Yes, I’m still mad at you,” Not-me said.

That hadn’t been what I was thinking. I set the book down and stepped into a stall to grab a book that had been kicked behind the toilet. I glanced at the chrome handle on the toilet as I bent down.

“I’d like to see you work towards a thing for the better part of a half century, only to watch your past self ignore reasonable instructions and blow it all up, and see if you don’t get spitting mad too.”

I opened my mouth to reply, glancing over my shoulder for Clyde, then whispered, “You seem pretty horrible. Are you a zombie? Why do you curse so much?”

“No, I’m stuck between worlds, not a zombie. You don’t need to whisper. Clyde Fischer, prickly old coot, turns his hearing aid off when he has to be around kids. And you’d curse too if you were incorporeal and needed to throw a tantrum. Can’t stomp your feet on this side.”

I stayed bent over by the toilet, Clyde was ignoring me. After a moment of silence, Not-Me sighed, “Look kid, I’ve always been hard on myself. I didn’t say anything to you I don’t say to myself in my head, but…” he hesitated, “that’s clearly not fair. When I came back, I was supposed to slip into my own past, not into your head. I… fuck me kid, why couldn’t you just go get that coin?”

“Why are you so upset about the coin? I can just go after school today and get it back, or better yet,” it occurred to me I hadn’t even been to see Jemima yet, “I can just not go see her. Jemima said my luck would come back.”

Not-me began chuckling, “Let me tell you something about what that sneaky, tricky Manbo did to us. As long as our blood remains on that charm of hers, it will continue to syphon off our luck. Luck is not what you think, and no, I'm not going to explain it. I know. You want explanations for every damn thing. Well, guess what? I spent my life pursuing explanations for everything, and now I'm stuck as a passenger in a twelve-year-old's body.

“Say that we do go to her house, say we do somehow talk her into giving us the charm. Where's the blood, genius?”

I thought about this problem for a minute. There was no blood on the coin now, because the day had been reset. It occurred to me that there was no problem. “No blood on the coin,” I said. “So what's the problem?”

“Yeah,” Not-me said. “This coin has no blood on it. It's not the charm that's continuing to siphon our luck. We can go get this charm, and it won't do us any good.

“Besides which, I never was very good at voodoo, so forget about that. Now, your typical Manbo, if she's a luck taker, will link a charm, let it build up for a little while, —maybe a day or two— until she has enough for something, and then she'll spend it. Slam, bam, that's it. That's the end of the contract.

“Guess what? That charm already has way more than enough for what it needs. It's taken my luck as well as yours. I spent years cultivating luck. The draw will increase as the charm falls in on itself, unspent energy drawing more. The charm needs to be spent or break to expel the excess, but it can’t, because it’s not here. The draw might even out if we find a way to live through this…” he let out a huge sigh. “I feel like the scientist in a bad movie explaining something to the hapless hero.

“Listen, here's the long and short of it. We can't get that charm back. It's gone. It's going to continue to siphon our luck. We're fucked. Here's the upshot. It's going to go from ok to bad to worse. You can't live without luck. Again, no, I'm not explaining it. What we have to do is find a way to refill our luck before this kills us, except that until out souls merge or cancel each other out we can’t die either… Don't believe me yet? Just watch how today goes.”

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

I thought about this. I wasn't sure what to believe. Jemima had told me that he would try to trick me. That I would have to kill him. That was a big question in my mind. I've been wanting to ask about what was going on with my reflection, but Not-Me had just given me too much to think about. The question died before I was able to give it voice.

I reached down for the book behind the toilet. It had wedged itself underneath the water supply line. I tried to pull it straight back out, but it was caught at a funny angle. I started wiggling it back and forth to get it to come free, watching as the cover began to tear. I resigned myself to need to buy new books. My mom was going to have a fit. Then I wondered if any of this stuff was going to matter. What if today reset again?

There was a sharp metallic plink sound, and suddenly water was spraying everywhere at a volume I couldn't believe. I sputtered and coughed and held the book up to protect myself. The metal supply line for the toilet had broken off somewhere inside the wall, and water was now geysering out of the hole. It was spraying so hard it was bouncing off the book I was holding as a shield and hitting the ceiling with some remarkable force.

I heard a shout behind me as Clyde noticed the indoor storm. Instead of running to me, he ran away. Some help he was. I stood and tried to get out of the way of the jet of water before I was completely soaked. It didn’t work.

After I stepped out of the stall, something inside the wall also broke, and tiles began to fall off the wall behind the toilet, one of them catching the water just right to deflect it back onto the ceiling once more. I was drenched, and the ceiling was now raining.

I looked around at my school supplies, all of them now in a puddle and hopelessly ruined, or about to be. There was no way I was going to be able to salvage anything. I glanced over at the mirror on the wall, and I could again see a pair of sneakers beneath the toilet stall that wasn't gushing water.

"Are you beginning to get the idea?" Not-Me said, his voice echoing around the bathroom.

***

I made my way over to the door, wanting to get out of the water spray and the wet. The bathroom floor had a drain set into the tile, but it was not working. Either my school supplies had clogged it, or it didn't work. The room was beginning to fill with water, which was a little alarming. I had no idea so much water could come from a toilet supply line. Already it was up to my ankles.

Reaching the door, I struggled to open it. I was able to pull it open partway, making waves in the water, but the door's automatic opener, high overhead, whined a mechanical whine, then stuck, leaving the door open a crack. I remembered Billy slamming the door open. Had it broken then, and just now stopped working?

I tried pulling harder, but the door wouldn't budge. Desperate to get out of this room and the water spray, I pushed on the door to give myself a little momentum to pull harder, and the door shut. I heard a click overhead as something in the machine that controlled the articulating arm stuck. I pulled hard on the door, but it didn’t budge. Now it was stuck shut.

Someone on the other side began banging on it, shouting something I couldn’t make out. I stepped back, remembering my backpack, and thought to myself that it would be unlucky if the door were to burst open while I was standing in front of it.

I stepped back over to the mirror, looking for the sneakers underneath the stall door. After a second, I found them, although they were submerged in water now.

"Well, that's unlucky," Not-Me said.

I shook my head. "Not helpful. Do you have any ideas on how to get us out of here?"

"Forget about getting out of here, kid. I'm trying to figure out how to get us some luck back."

"Why are you hiding?" I asked, thinking to myself that it would be a lot easier to talk to Not-Me if I didn't have to hunt for him like some sort of creeper every time I wanted to say anything.

"Trying to do you a favor, kid," Not-Me said. "The last time we were face to face, it didn't go so well."

I thought about that. I supposed he was talking about when he had been Not-Cece. This was why I had begun thinking of him as a zombie.

"Yeah," I said, remembering. "You scared the bejesus out of me."

Not-Me began to chuckle at my word choice. "Bejesus? Christ, kid, I forgot I was ever so young. Yeah, sorry about that," he said.

"Look," I said, "I'm not scared. You just freaked me out and the rest..." I trailed off as I realized.

“It was just unlucky,” Not-Me finished for me.

"Yeah," I said.

"Alright, kid, you asked for it." He opened the stall door and stepped out. It was me, except much like Not-Cece, I was falling apart. He looked like a zombie from a horror movie.

"Ew," I said. "That's gross."

Skin was hanging off Not-Me's face in tatters, and he had lost one of his eyeballs. There were bloody, festering wounds on Not-me and rot had taken chunks of his flesh off his body. Pieces of Not-Me's face had gone gray with decay.

"What's going on? If you're not a zombie, what are you?" I asked.

"Trapped in-between sides," he said. "Anything that I use to talk to you is just going to fall apart," he said. "I don't really have any control over it," he shrugged, and one of his arms made a boneless move and locked high out of place. He didn't seem to notice. "I can't actually affect anything from this side," he said.

"Why is my reflection gone?" I asked, looking for real me in the mirror.

Not-Me tapped his chin. "That's a good question, kid. I've never been trapped in-between worlds before. It looks like your reflection is gone because I'm using it."

"Huh?" I said. "That doesn't make any sense. That's not how mirrors work."

"No, that's not how you think they work," Not-Me said. "How they actually work is a matter of some debate."

"No, it's not," I said.

"Alright, then explain to me what's going on, Einstein."

He had me at that. I was being the closed-minded person in a discussion. I shook my head.

"Can other people see my reflection?" I asked him.

"That's a great question. It sure would make you spooky as shit if they couldn't. Can you imagine sneaking up on people?"

I thought about it. I could, actually. I wasn't sure this sounded like fun. "How do we fix it?" I asked.

"Who cares, kid? Not having a reflection is the least of your problems right now. What we need to fix is the fact that we've basically become a lightning rod for everything that could possibly go wrong, no matter how unlikely."

"Okay," I said, "do you have any idea how to do that?"

Not-Me tapped his chin thoughtfully again, the action causing bits of flesh to break away and fall off. I winced at the gruesome image.

"You know what? Actually, I think maybe we can. I think we need to go back and pay Jemima another visit. I was only there for a short time. I think I know what she did."

I looked at him. "You told me that she bound us together."

He shook his head. "No, that's what I thought happened. I think she did something much worse. But in this case, it might be good for us because perhaps we can get her to do it again."

***